This searing yet beautiful firsthand account of the life and working the conditions of industrial workers in the north of England during the 1930s caused Orwell to ask why Socialism had so little appeal.

Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world in which privacy does not exist, news is manufactured according to the authorities' will, and those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death. Orwell's 1949 nightmare vision of the...